I trimmed all the blocks to make them fit perfectly so I would be less tempted to stretch a bias edge, and of course I overtrimmed one of them. Took me a bit to deal with that complication, but otherwise it went pretty smoothly. Better than that, it was fun!
And for the second top -- I'm going to use the hourglass blocks I showed yesterday in a column down the left side, a row of 3" blocks like the ones above across the bottom, and the rest of the quilt will have sets of Chinese coins using these strings. I should be able to use all the waste pieces from this quilt plus all the animal strings I've cut. I'm excited about it!
I used strings from animal fabrics donated for Project Linus quilts (and this quilt will be donated), but decided to make the blocks bigger than Ami suggested so the strips could be wide enough to see the animals a little better. Because I didn't think it through carefully, I thought a 9" yellow strip would give me 9" block. But duh, it gives me a 12" block! That's a lot of blank yellow space.
I sought to liven up the quilt a bit by using the waste pieces (my miscalculation gave me lots!) to make an interesting border. I was also hoping that the quilter might practice some clever quilting in the yellow, or I thought I might cut some animals out of fabric and do a little brodie perse in the blank spaces.
But it occurred to me I could cut each block in half on the diagonal (I have more blocks than are on the design wall) and reassemble them as shown above to chop up the yellow space. But since I hadn't planned on doing that, I would now end up with bias edges on all sides, eek! I could stay stitch the edges and sew carefully. Would that be ok? Any thoughts on what I should do would be welcome!
Also sewed some blocks using pieces from a fabric exchange. These are for Bonnie Hunter's Sticks and Stones quilt. I have been getting my sewing area cleaned up by folding, stacking, organizing, and stitching UFO's. It has gotten my creative juices flowing and I have lots of ideas. Finishing up these projects so I can move on will feel great!
She told us that she had been using a freezer paper technique that has you work in reverse, with the freezer paper templates ironed on to the back of the fabric, but once she accidentally ironed on to the front and realized how much more forgiving it was to work that way -- if something is not exact, then you move the template to where it should be and keep going! And it's true, this was an amazingly simple technique and it's extremely forgiving. I never would have believed it!
Here's a closeup to show some snow and tree branches. You can click on all these photos to enlarge them and take a closer look.
And I love the tree trunk!
Another quilter in the class put her hand down (Cynthia let us touch and photograph) to give an idea of scale. I love her fabric choices in the snow -- that bit of pink is just perfect!
I couldn't get a good photo of the back of her quilt, but here's an angled one. Very simple, but it was also beautiful.
And here's her pieced bird on a branch on the bottom of the back. It made me realize that incorporating her technique for a small area can be very effective -- I don't know that I have the patience to make an entire large quilt like this!
Here's a detail of the border of one of her quilts, again, all pieced. You can see the full quilt on her website, here. If you go to her home page, you'll find links to videos, a step-by-step tutorial and a few free patterns to help you learn her technique. It's not nearly so fiddly as you might think!
And what did I made in the class? Here's the beginning of her Country Roads design. She asked us to make one of 3 patterns. You could use your own fabrics or buy a packet for the kit, and I did the latter. I wanted to learn the technique and knew I'd spend the entire time making fabric choices if I didn't use what she gave us. In addition to teaching this piecing method, Cynthia also showed us several shortcuts she's developed over the years and demonstrated how to take a photo and turn it into a pattern for this method. Great class!
I always drool over Vicki's dyed fabrics (at Field Trips in Fiber), and now that she's opened an Etsy shop, I got to buy some! I didn't know which of her color palettes to choose, but finally went for the bluebird. The blues are gorgeous and I need to broaden my stash with browns and neutrals -- and all of these will be perfect for landscapes, which I would like to make (more on that in the next post). Thanks, Vicki! I love this and could not be happier!
Because I was catching up on Linus, I didn't work on my own projects. Since I showed you some of the cut strippie quilt kits in the last post, I thought I'd show one of my favorites all made up. These strippies show novelty fabrics off so well, and I had a great time rummaging through our Linus stash of donated fabrics to find things that worked together. It's great practice in design!
I didn't notice until I looked at this photo that the cats look stretched out behind those middle strips! Next time I'll be sure not to put the strips in the order they were cut -- though a kid might have fun looking at that.
And just for fun, here's a close-up of another one with really cute frogs. The colors in the photo are off (that's a beautiful lime green in the middle), but it's still fun.
This is no larger than a placemat, and the Drunkard's Path is not pieced, but it's fussy cut from circles. What a great result!
Along with the little quilt came the fabric that was used to make it -- look closely and you can see the holes where the circles were cut out for the little quilt. I discovered the gaps when I started to cut a strippie quilt for Project Linus with them. I'm not going to be able to cut enough strips from the Swiss cheese fabric, so I'll end up making a different quilt with them. No big deal -- they are such fun fabrics!
Here are 6 strippie quilt kits I cut today (which is why I haven't been making progress on my own projects -- we have a worknight tomorrow and I'm getting prepared). Just in case you don't know about Mary Johnson's easy but wonderful patterns for donation quilts, hop over to Mary Quilts and take a look. It's an incredible resource and Mary has generously donated her time and talents so that quilters can download these patterns for free. She also has a blog, MaryQuilts - Making Scrap Quilts from Stash, and runs the Heartstrings Quilt Project. I've decided to make strippie quilts tomorrow night (listed on Mary Quilts as Quick Strippie, under Q) because we can piece lots of tops in very little time. At the moment my friend Joe, who has a new longarm machine, is practicing on Project Linus tops, and we aim to keep him very busy!
I cut squares out of the first piece of string fabric I put together. There will be much greater variation when all the pieces are made, but I just couldn't wait. There will be pieces with dashes of brights, too.
I had put only 2 of the checkered borders on this I Spy. I always get bogged down when I get to the borders because the fun is over by then. But I bit the bullet today and put on the remaining 2 checkered strips and the green border, and then pieced and attached the outer border. Just have to piece the backing, sandwich, quilt, and bind!
I also went through two boxes of t-shirts that my sister sent me almost two years ago! She asked me to make a quilt of them as a memento of the various military assignments her husband has had over the years. I was going to have it ready when they returned from overseas this summer, but they came home several months earlier than expected and I had not even started! There are so many shirts that I think I'll make two tops -- one with black and gold fabrics added (the colors of the US Military Academy) and one with red, white and blue. I've sorted the shirts into those two groups and now I'm going to wash and prep them.
The beautiful new Champaign Public Library has funky air vents. Aren't the different sized holes so much more interesting than row after row of identical slots? And wouldn't that be a great quilt -- each block representing something artistically interesting in the building!
There is, of course, the inevitable post-mortem (how apt for Halloween!), but despite the things I would change -- like a smaller hole in the p -- I really like it. Thank you everyone for your suggestions! I considered them all and then tried mixing up the fabrics within the letters (Tonya's suggestion) and used the first alternate m (Tonya again -- after all the word is for her quilt). Quilt Pixie suggested fussy cutting the fabric with the clusters of dots, and I did that to make the word bottom heavy. After all the trouble with the m, it is unexpectedly my favorite part of the word! Not only is it thumping downward, but I think it has a spiderlike, creepy-crawly aspect to it. Fun!
The orange is my background, and I had thought about doing a different black with white dots for each letter, but I didn't have enough. Going from left to right, I like the first one, find the second one too regular, I like the third and think it would add interest because of the varying density of dots (or it might just be distracting), the fourth is one of my all-time favorite B&W fabrics, and the fifth...well...it isn't dotted but has a crackled look that says Halloween to me. Here's a close-up:
I would make all the letters with this crackly one but I think the contrast with the orange may not be great enough. So currently I'm leaning towards using only one fabric, either fabric 3 or 4, but every time I go to cut strips, I waffle. Please, advise!
As I sew, it calls out to me, "I am the ocean, the waves, the sea...I am the sparkling blue Mediterranean...I dance with the sunshine..." and all I can see is bits of yellow playing with it, not red. Guess I will cut it and play around to see, but I need to get something up in my family room after a year of promising to do so.
I love the black and white trails in this one, and the huge assortment of bright fabrics. I believe this quilt was donated to a local children's home. As you can see, it's simply B&W 4 patches and fabric squares. It doesn't get much easier.
This quilt was donated by a guild member (I'm sorry I don't know who) and was clearly made from scraps. It's twelve 15-patch blocks joined with sashing and bright cornerstones.
This is a very sweet quilt made with lots of scrap strings, I think using Bonnie Hunter's String-X pattern. It was donated by a guild member. [Update: Just heard from my friend Bunny -- who needs a blog of her own! -- that she made this quilt and did indeed use Bonnie's String-X pattern.]
This quilt is a standard pattern that we use to make kits -- we just cut 6-1/2 inch squares from our donated scraps and strips of solid sashing, and any guild member can take a kit home to put together. I hope this one ended up in the hands of a child whose favorite color is blue!
We sort our stash into broad categories or we'd never find anything! For this easy attic windows quilt, we cut squares from our stash of animal fabrics and used our solids for the window frames and sashing. This is another one of our standard kit patterns.
